The skies are busy this week as we build to a climactic full moon total lunar eclipse on Sunday September 27th.

Now that Venus is travelling forwards again, she makes her third trine to Uranus since June. This aspect has to do with electric, creative insight and innovation around beauty, harmony, relationship, and money. This is an energy we’ve been working with all summer, so see if there is a recurring theme for you in these areas. It may have to do with thinking about money or what you value in a different way, or bringing a revolutionary impulse to your relationships.

Wednesday is the Autumn Equinox; the Sun shifts from Virgo into Libra. This brings more awareness to relationship, balance, and justice, which are major themes for the next few weeks. On the same day, the Sun sextiles Saturn and conjuncts the North Node. For the past year and a half, the North Node in Libra has been showing us the importance of collaboration in bringing about the world of our dreams; the importance of relationship in serving our highest purpose. Now, Saturn is helping us to give material form to what has till now been merely dreamt and imagined. Now it’ll be easier to instantiate collaborations, and make practical plans to organize our collective efforts. Saturn demands patience: Wednesday shines a light on these plans, but these efforts will continue for years to come.

On Thursday, Mercury squares Pluto and Pluto stations direct, inviting us to dig down beneath the surface illusion to find a more substantial, complex, and messy reality. Investigate, research, talk it out. Words have great power. The mind can stay on the surface and run the same boring circles, or take us somewhere deeper, richer, more interesting. Those who heed Pluto’s call to go deep need courage, for the truth is rarely pretty, though it holds great power. We always have the choice to look away, to remain ignorant, and maintain the illusion of harmony.

On Thursday, Mars shifts from Leo to Virgo, then on Friday, squares Saturn. This brings our will to bear on matters of work, service, health, and routine, and then frustrates any efforts in those areas. Saturn can bring blocks, limitations, restrictions. Saturn’s intention isn’t to annoy us but to help us find the appropriate timing, and make the necessary preparations before moving ahead with our plans. So if your progress is blocked, consider that there may be a higher reason--perhaps the timing is simply not right, or there is a lesson to be learned.

Finally, on Sunday, September 27th, at 7:50pm PST, we have a full moon total lunar eclipse at 4 degrees of Aries. This may well be intense, show us what we couldn’t see, and release emotions we hadn’t dealt with. It may bring about a major change in some area of your life, mark an ending and beginning and/or transformation (for more specificity, see what area of your chart this eclipse occurs in--definitely early Aries, with birthdays in March, and those with Aries rising will feel this strongly, but anyone with planets or angles near 4 degrees Aries will too).

This eclipse triggers the Aries-Libra axis, highlighting the polarity between self and other. To truly honour both relationships, and the Self, we need to find a balance between these poles. An overemphasis of Libra energy can mean becoming lost in relationship: defining yourself by your relationships, being overly concerned with the thoughts and opinions of others, not valuing your own inner guidance. In contrast, and overemphasis of Aries can mean self-centeredness: a lack of attention to others, separation or breaking off relationships when they could have been resolved, imposing yourself on others.

The esoteric lesson is that we can’t truly relate to others without maintaining connection to the Self, and we can’t truly know ourselves except through relationship; we can’t care for others unless we care for ourselves, and we can’t care for ourselves, unless we care for others.